a16z

It's time to build.

Why OpenClaw will create jobs: " I can't see these as doing anything other than creating a lot more jobs. Like there's just so much more stuff that needs to get built and needs to get managed." "The same thing happened with cloud, right? When cloud came around, I remember sitting in my big corporate job thinking 'half of these people will be gone in five years.'" "And then, lo and behold, 10 years later, 20 years later, the IT organizations are bigger than they were then, and they're spending even more money." " Trying to ignore this new technology and waiting for it to go away usually doesn't work." @stuffyokodraws @appenz on the AI + a16z Podcast

The current internet wasn't built for agents. "There’s a huge opportunity for startups to create these proxies… if someone would give me a scoped Gmail, I’d adopt it today." "There are websites today where the majority of the revenue, and certainly the majority of profits, come from cross-selling. If this website is suddenly only used by agents, that doesn't work anymore, right?" "All of these large consumer sites... they don't want agents, essentially." "One interesting question here is: will the big incumbents catch up and offer their functionality for agents, or do we actually need new companies that cater to agents specifically?" "Do we actually need to replace some of the big sort of SaaS building blocks of e-commerce, of online services, and redo them for agents?" @stuffyokodraws @appenz on the AI + a16z Podcast

Sir, that's a CD-ROM drive @pmarca with @davidsenra

Why did OpenClaw take off? “I found it relatively easy to set up and get going… I didn’t have to spend seven hours just to do the Telegram use case and start playing with it.” "I just think it's sort of that, like just that level of accessibility to users who are maybe not living in a codebase day-to-day." "The other agent frameworks were pretty difficult to use, incredibly flaky, [I] didn't really want to spend a lot of time debugging someone else's stuff." "There's another major part of this that it can extend itself." "It's the first agent I've seen where I can say, 'I want integration with something.' And it's like: 'well, I've never seen this before, there's no package for that, but let me try to put something together.'" "There is definitely a long-running nature of it. You leave it running for a night and you're like, keep working on this until you finish." @stuffyokodraws @appenz on the AI + a16z Podcast

We’re excited to lead Deeptune’s Series A. @deeptuneai is building leading RL environments for computer-use and code. More data, more compute, and better architectures can only take us so far. As models move into real-world task execution, they need structured environments where they can learn to fully control computers and perform knowledge work tasks. Designing high-quality RL environments is extraordinarily difficult to get right, but Deeptune has proven they can, working closely with leading AI labs and developing environments for computer use that are already showing up in benchmark improvements. Deeptune’s founder and CEO, Tim Lupo, is an exceptional leader with a rare combination of technical expertise and product intuition. We’re thrilled to partner with Tim and the Deeptune team as they build this critical layer of the AI stack. By @Mascobot and @martin_casado

Excited to announce @deeptuneai has raised $43M Series A led by @a16z. Labs and enterprises must turn model capability into real-world performance. Doing so will require distilling the entire economy into environments for AI. We believe this to be the most critical work in the pursuit of AGI. We’re a small, focused team of engineers and operators in New York. If you want to work on the hardest (and weirdest) problems of your career, we would love to hear from you.

We've entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team. I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done so far, incredibly grateful to everyone that's supported us, and incredibly excited to keep building tools that make programming feel different.

Jacob Helberg says sovereignty is defined by whoever controls the hardware of the internet: "If you have a foreign government that controls and can instrumentalize its tech companies that operate the hardware of the internet—it fundamentally challenges our traditional conception of sovereignty, because it raises the question: what does it mean to be sovereign when a foreign power knows all the deepest, darkest secrets of all the judges, journalists, and jurists, and politicians in your country." "The definition of sovereignty starts to look very different in a world like that." "And so the first Trump administration carried out and prosecuted a very comprehensive campaign that basically argued that Huawei and ZTE are national security threats. That campaign has been sustained across administrations since then, including this one." @jacobhelberg with @eriktorenberg

Jacob Helberg says one of Europe’s biggest challenges to building companies is cultural: they’re just not risk-takers like Americans are. "It's really hard for Europe to put those pieces together because the culture in Europe has not been favorable to encouraging risk-taking, which is necessary—it's the lifeblood of starting a business." "You need to have a risk-taking culture—and then they have the unit economics problem where it's just really expensive to build stuff in Europe because your energy bills are really high. You have to spend a ton of money on legal fees before you even start." "It's not that starting things in Europe will be impossible, but they have major headwinds." "We have invested a lot of effort into having truthful, candid conversations with our friends in Europe to actually share our concerns." "When you actually care about someone, you can actually be candid with them. Clear is kind." "We care about Europe. We want them to be strong, and so we are trying to draw their attention to policy issues that we think are serious headwinds for them." @jacobhelberg with @eriktorenberg

Jacob Helberg: The future will belong to the builders. "You need to be able to make things, and the national security strategy that we released actually has a line that's very apt: The future will belong to builders." "What the tariffs do is they change the economics of building—they provide American builders with a re-leveled playing field that makes it economical for them to compete if they build in America." "It's actually in total contrast to what Europe is doing, sadly, where you have super high energy prices, insane regulation, and insanely high taxes. You see the result—a continued deindustrialization of Europe, which is very regrettable." "We think these things are choices, and you can actually reverse them. And we're seeing that play out in real time." @jacobhelberg with @eriktorenberg

Payback isn't everything More charts: a16z.news/t/charts

Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara: "I think that politics are going to get better because you're going to have a way faster feedback loop on the messaging and the policies." "Right now when a candidate says 10 things and they win or they lose, you're trying to make one assessment of so many things that the candidate did." "But now you can have real time of like, 'they said this, what was the response?' And you can get that in that faster feedback loop, which I think makes startups great." "If candidates are able to... optimize their message to what people really want and what policies people want... they're just going to know what people want better." Tarek Mansour: "It's like you get a score on all of the different things you've done." @luanalopeslara and @mansourtarek_ on Cheeky Pint with @collision and @matthuang

Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour on the growing demand for better sources of information: "There wasn't a real pain 10 or 15 years ago in the way there is pain in the last few years." "I think the country is more polarized. I would say the world is more polarized." "Social media has really bifurcated social feeds." "The incentive structure for most things that we read these days is clickbait." "There's a meaningful and accelerating rise of distrust in traditional sources of information." "And so you need a new one." "The incentive structure for prediction markets is truth." "It is more volume. It is more liquidity, which translates to a better and more accurate forecast." @mansourtarek_ and @luanalopeslara on Cheeky Pint with @collision and @matthuang

Anish Acharya says now that software is no longer a precious resource, it becomes ubiquitous—and often disposable: “It’s sort of like generative music. I think that music is incredible, but there are not that many people who make music that is disposable, for good reason. A lot of music is high-cost to create, and you have to create it very carefully.” “But now we’re starting to see memetic music—where people are creating a track on Suno or on Udio just for a joke, or for a meme, or for a bachelor party weekend, or whatever else.” “You reduce the sort of complexity of creation and you’ve found all these new needs and demands for music.” “In the same way, if you reduce the cost of creating software, you make it less specialized all of a sudden.” “When it comes to personal software—software that’s disposable, or software that’s only relevant for a moment in time—you were talking about being at the Super Bowl. There should have been a mini app experience just for you and the people sitting around you.” “That software would’ve had no value the next day, or even when the game ended, and because of the trade-offs that were implied, you never would’ve created that prior.” @illscience on @ALEngineered

Anish Acharya says there's an "unbundling" of product management happening: “There was a part of product management that was very technical—that was sort of pointing people in the direction of a market need.” “If you look at the big labs, you’ll see the product managers there are very close to research. They’re more technical than PMs have been in a long time, maybe in a generation since the @bhorowitz era.” “If you look at the other side, you see PMs working with multi-agent systems and 10 instances of Claude, Code, or Codex.” “I think the unbundling in specialization is going to be how it shows up, rather than being a zero-sum Mexican standoff.” “I put a meme up about this. If you’re an engineer reviewing your 57th PR from product management, it’s driving you a little crazy.” “That’s just the moment of transition, as we go from the old definition of our professions to the new ones.” @illscience on @ALEngineered

In the 1990s and 2000s, email “replaced” physical mail and changed the nature of correspondence. The same thing is happening right now with customer attention. If you think AI is just going to “replace” the call center agent, you’re stuck thinking about first-order effects. AI is going to create an entirely new category of customer relationship that was previously impossible, just like how email created an entirely new category of communication. a16z's Sarah Wang on how Decagon is using AI to give everyone concierge service: a16z.news/p/the-internet…

"Kalshi is built on people who are monitoring the situation." Kalshi co-founders @luanalopeslara and @mansourtarek_ describe the unique profile of market makers: "The guys in the garage are extremely crucial to the ecosystem because they price fast. They're monitoring the situation, all the time right. They're the original situation monitors." "One example I'll give, and I've given this in the past, is the best inflation forecaster on Kalshi over the last few years is none of the institutions or big hedge funds, it's this guy who lives in Kansas - never traded financial markets before, [he] just likes to read the news." "And just knows how to predict inflation. He can feel it, you know, and you have so many of these people, I mean, I would say a few thousand that are formally committed, but there are tens of thousands of these people that know about a bunch of different topics. And they're sort of actively pricing these things, and they do it as a full-time job, and they get rewarded for that." @collision @matthuang

Marc Andreessen's Introspection Levels More charts: a16z.news/t/charts

The Einstein Test for AGI. @vishalmisra: “You take an LLM and train it on pre-1916 physics and see if it can come up with the theory of relativity.” “If it does, then we have AGI.” “It’s a high bar, but we should have high bars.” “At the time of Einstein, there were a lot of clues that Newtonian mechanics, there was something missing.” “But until Einstein came up with a new representation of the spacetime continuum, we were stuck.” “If you had a model that just looked at correlations and such... it would not have come up with the beautiful equation that Einstein came up with.” Vishal Misra with @martin_casado

"Our entire job as investors is to find the next great Elon Musk. The next Palmer Luckey. Palmer Luckey doesn't want to work with an empty suit." @KTmBoyle says if you're a VC who's afraid to tell the truth, "You don't deserve the perch." "Founders choose who they want to work with. They ultimately want to work with people who tell them the truth." "What I think is great about the venture industry is that it incentives people to actually say who they are. And people who have a different perspective and who aren't afraid to say the hard thing, I sometimes think get more rewarded than the people who are afraid." "I do think we had this horrible period during 2010 through the COVID era where people were way too afraid to say the real thing." "It is our duty as people who have a platform to say what we think." @KTmBoyle with @nypost